Journalist Glenn Greenwald condemned the mainstream media during an address at a German computer conference on Friday and accused his colleagues of failing to challenge erroneous remarks routinely made by government officials around the globe.

Thousands of attendees at the thirtieth annual Chaos
Communication Congress in Hamburg packed into a room to watch the
46-year-old lawyer-turned-columnist present a keynote address
delivered less than seven months after he started working with
former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Revelations contained in leaked
documents supplied by Snowden to Greenwald and other
journalists have sparked international outrage and efforts to
reform the far-reaching surveillance operations waged by the NSA
and intelligence officials in allied nations. But speaking
remotely from Brazil this week, Greenwald argued that the media
establishment at large is guilty of failing significantly with
respect to accomplishing its most crucial role: keeping
governments in check.

When Greenwald and his colleagues began working with Snowden, he
said they realized that they’d have to act in a way that wasn’t
on par with how the mainstream media has acted up until now.

“We resolved that we were going to have to be very disruptive
of the status quo — not only the surveillance and political
status quo, but also the journalistic status quo,” Greenwald
said. “And I think one of the ways that you can see what it
is that we were targeting is in the behavior of the media over
the past six months since these revelations have emerged almost
entirely without them and despite them.”

“[W]e knew in particular that one of our most formidable
adversaries was not simply going to be the intelligence agencies
on which we were reporting and who we were trying to expose, but
also their most loyal, devoted servants, which calls itself the
United States and British media.”

“It really is the case that the United States and British
governments are not only willing but able to engage in any
conduct no matter how grotesque,” Greenwald said.
Nevertheless, he added, journalists tasked with reporting on
those issues have all too often been compliant with the blatant
lies made by officials from those governments.

Halfway through his remarks, Greenwald recalled a recent quip he
made while being interviewed by BBC about the necessity of a
functioning media in an environment where government officials
can spew untruths to reporters without being questioned.

“[A]t one point I made what I thought was the very
unremarkable and uncontroversial observation that the reason why
we have a free press is because national security officials
routinely lie to the population in order to shield their power
and get their agenda advanced,” recalled Greenwald, who said
it is both the “the goal and duty of a journalist is to be
adversarial to those people in power.”

According to Greenwald, the BBC reporter met his remark with
skepticism.

“I just cannot believe that you would suggest that senior
officials, generals in the US and the British government, are
actually making false claims to the public,” he remembered
being told on-air.

“It really is the central view of certainly American and
British media stars, that when — especially people with medals on
their chest who are called generals, but also high officials in
the government — make claims that those claims are presumptively
treated as true without evidence. And that it’s almost immoral to
call them into question or to question their voracity,” he
said.

“Obviously we went through the Iraq War, in which those very
two same governments specifically and deliberately lied
repeatedly to the government, to their people, over the course of
two years to justify an aggressive war that destroyed a country
of 26 million people. But we’ve seen it continuously over the
last six months as well.”

From there, he went on to cite the example of US Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper, who earlier this year made
remarks to Congress that were quickly proved false by documents
leaked to Greenwald by Mr. Snowden. The very first National
Security Agency document he was shown, Greenwald said,
“revealed that the Obama administration had succeeded in
convincing court, a secret court, to compel phone companies to
turn over to the NSA every single phone record of every single
telephone call.”

Clapper “went to the Senate and lied to
their faces...which is at least as serious of a crime as
anything Edward Snowden is accused of," Greenwald added.

But DNI Clapper aside, Greenwald said that the established media
continues to reject the notion that government officials spew
lies. Snowden’s NSA documents have exposed those fibs on more
than one occasion, he noted, yet reporters around the world
continue to take the word of officials as fact rather than dig
from the truth.

“Their role is not to be adversarial. Their role is to be
loyal spokespeople to those powerful factions that they pretend
to exercise oversight,” Greenwald said.

But as the US, UK and other governments continue to feed the
media lies, Greenwald said their operations are far from being
single-pronged. The US “knows that its only hope for
continuing to maintain its regiment of secrecy behind which it
engages with radical and corrupt acts is to intimidate and deter
and threaten people who are would-be whistleblowers and
transparency activists from coming forward and doing what it is
that they do by showing them that they’ll be subjected to even
the most extreme punishments and there’s nothing that they can do
about it,” he said. “And it’s an effective tactic.”

Ironically, he added, those nations are “fueling the fire of
this activism with their own abusive behavior.”

Meanwhile, NSA reform may not happen as quickly as Greenwald,
Snowden and others have hoped; despite a series of considerable
victories
for privacy advocates as of late, a federal judge in New York
said moments before Friday’s address that the surveillance
policies exposed by those leaks are not
in violation of the US Constitution. The American Civil
Liberties Union sued
DNI Clapper in June after Greenwald and others
wrote that the government was compelling telecoms for
telephony metadata pertaining to millions of Americans. But
District Judge William Pauley wrote on Friday that “Whether
the Fourth Amendment protects bulk telephony metadata is
ultimately a question of reasonableness.”

And while Judge Pauley and proponents of that program and similar
surveillance operations continue to call the NSA’s efforts
imperative in America’s war on terror, Greenwald said at Friday’s
conference that their intention is much more sinister than
stopping another 9/11 from occurring.

The NSA’s goal, Greenwald said, is to “ensure that all forms
of human communication . . .are collected, monitored, stored and
analyzed by that agency and by their allies.”